Scattershooting While Mourning The Passing of Guy Clark

An NBC News/Survey Monkey poll released yesterday showed a couple of interesting items:

·         Trump has now narrowed Hillary’s lead in this tracking survey to just 3 percentage points nationally, registering 45% support to Clinton’s 48%; and

·         Hillary’s lead among women in this survey sits at 15%.

That second stat may seem daunting until one realizes that Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney among women in 2012 by 12 percentage points.  That tiny 3 point difference is kind of amazing given Hillary’s focus on basing her entire campaign on the fact that she happens to be a woman.

Trump still has six months to narrow that gap, and probably needs to get it down to somewhere in the single digits to be able to prevail in November.  Given the way in which millennial women have been abandoning Hillary for Bernie Sanders as they find out about Mrs. Clinton’s sordid past, it does seem likely this gap will continue to narrow.

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Last night’s interview with Megyn Kelly, during which Trump buried the hatchet with his most prominent female media tormentor, will help improve Trump’s ratings with women, especially if he follows it up with a more civil tone to his campaign in general.  You can tell the interview was effective for both Trump and Kelly, since the nitwits who inhabit Salon.com and the Huffington Post are bashing them both this morning.

No doubt the New York Times will weigh in on the interview later today in its role as the chief media agent organ for the Hillary Clinton campaign.  Can’t wait.

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Meanwhile, the Clinton Campaign continues to put its cluelessness about how to go about attacking Trump on public display, the latest example coming in the form of an interview of Clinton Campaign Chief Strategist Joel Benenson by Michael Bender of Bloomberg.  

Here is one telling excerpt:

He brushed off much of the conventional wisdom about the race, arguing that no matter how creatively Trump has employed his celebrity and business alpha-prowess, he’d succumb to an attack revealing that he isn’t actually on the side of ordinary Americans, and that ultimately, voters would choose [Mrs.] Clinton over him on the economy for the simple reason that her policies and priorities are better.

I would submit to you that this is exactly the sort of faulty thinking that we’ve been hearing from Trump’s now-banished 16 opponents on the GOP side, as well as from the “smart people” in the #NeverTrump movement.  That kind of conventional political thinking is why those 16 opponents all failed, and why #NeverTrump is a rapidly dying brand.

Here’s another hilariously clueless excerpt:

“She’s the only candidate who’s talked about a real jobs plan, with manufacturing and small businesses at the center of it; a real approach to competing and winning in a global economy, where we make more goods here that we sell to 95 percent of the consumers who live outside the United States; about a plan to raise wages; and a plan for equal pay for women,” Benenson said. “This isn’t about bluster. It’s about having real plans to get stuff done. When it comes to the economy, Hillary Clinton is the only candidate with plans that have been vetted and will make a difference in people’s lives.”

Seriously, I’ve now read that paragraph half a dozen times, and I still laugh out loud every time.  Ask yourself this:  Which of Trump’s 16 GOP opponents had the most “plans”?  Wasn’t it Jeb!?   Why yes, I think it was.

Isn’t Jeb! the candidate whose campaign and Super PACs ran through about $200 million and ended up failing to win a damn thing before he finally accepted reality and gave up the ghost after South Carolina?  Why yes, I believe he is.

Look, plans are great, and obviously our government needs better plans.  But if the Clinton camp honestly believes that this election is going to be won by the candidate who best explains the details of their six dozen plans to “fix” every ill in our society, they are literally doomed to suffer a landslide defeat.

Let’s all hope they don’t change their thinking one little bit.  Hilarious.